C J Hall
I was born in Texas, spending the first half of my childhood outside Odessa and the last half outside Fort Worth. I started writing my first stories in letters to my grandmother, who lived in California. In my kindergarten print, I told her stories about rabbits and dogs and all sorts of other creatures.
My early childhood home was humble and isolated. I had my sister’s company, and as I grew, books. During the summer, my mother would drive us to the library in town once a week so I could exchange my large stack of borrowed books. After exhausting the entire children’s section of the Odessa Public Library, I began venturing into Adult Fiction. When we moved across the state, I dove even further into books, discovering Romance, Historical Fiction, Horror, and Westerns, in addition to the Biographies, Mystery, and Science Fiction I’d loved as a younger child.
I couldn’t wait to get out on my own, so I left home at the age of 17 and have been “adulting” ever since. I lived in Kansas City for several years, where I gave birth to my only child and also received a degree in Psychology from Rockhurst University. After graduating I spent nearly 22 years working as a civil servant for the federal government and raising my son. After launching my son into adulthood and exhausting my capacity for civil service, I decided to immerse myself full time in the stories that plead with me to bring them to life.
When I’m not writing, I serve in the royal court of King Crash the Tailthumper (“Crash” for short), my beloved dog whose internal dialogue I suspect is far more interesting than my own. Crash and I are based in Texas but are a bit nomadic at the moment. We spend most of our time traveling around in our RV visiting places that inspire me to write passionately, read avidly, tend to the land with care, and (occasionally) quilt with conviction.
Evolving Elizah: Initiatum
Summary
Elizah (Liz) Goeff was born into a world much like the one we know today, but she doesn’t remember it. It’s all gone now, covered in ash after a series of natural disasters threw North American civilization into a death spiral. Now Liz’s world is the Green Grow 3, a lush space farm orbiting Earth designed to feed humanity until the planet can heal itself.
The space farm was a brilliant plan that might have worked, if not for the terrorist group that calls itself the New Generation. They are intent on destroying the Green Grow dream, and Liz is intent on destroying them. They took everything that mattered to her – her home, her mother, and her older brother Jackson who has been missing for years. She won’t let them take the Green Grow 3 as well.
Cut off from the Green Grow Executive Council and abandoned by their former Captain, Liz will do anything to help her friend and now-Captain, Seth, to keep the ship and its inhabitants safe. They are her people now. Or are they? As Liz fights to save the ship and humanity, she realizes that nothing is as it seems – not the New Generation, not her brother’s disappearance, and not the war she assumed Green Grow was winning.
When New Generation spies are captured on the ship, they begin to reveal truths about Liz’s world and her family that she struggles to accept. As her illusions unravel, this fierce young woman must decide – who should she fight for now, and to what end? And is it really possible that she alone has the power to end to the conflict that has defined her entire life?
This book is one of the BBNYA semi-finalists, a contest run by book bloggers to vote for their favourite indie-published book. To read more about BBNYA, click here.
